As a salon owner if you were asked to identify areas of your business that upon improving would make a significant difference to your turnover and profits amongst the list would be filling cancellations at short notice, filling gaps in staff columns/appointment diaries and reducing client “no-shows”.

The significance of these areas can not be underestimated in fact it’s often shocking to learn that if on average a salon was to fill two cancellations each week and just 4 gaps that they previously would not fill they would increase their turnover by £11,000 per annum.

How you can fill cancellations using our service

Cancellations that you get at short notice say within 4 hours or on the same day of the appointment are traditionally very difficult to fill. You can keep a last-minute list of clients that have said they want a space but how often have you called someone only to find out they have booked elsewhere or since changed their mind? Facebook is something that can work if the cancellation is for an appointment in a day or 2 time however it’s still not that reliable since on average a Facebook post will only get in front of 3 – 5 % of your page followers. You could send an SMS message to all of your clients however this would defeat the object since the cost of the SMS would often outweigh the cost of the appointment.

As a result the cancelled appointments usually don’t get filled. So why are out salon clients saying things like this?

We use it to fill in gaps and last-minute cancellations and we’ve probably saved around £120 a day. Andrew Hill Salon, Devon.

The answer is a technology called Push Notifications. You will know what these are as you get them all the time from apps like Whatsapp, Facebook, Twitter. These are the messages that pop up on your smartphones screen that look just like SMS messages. Push notifications are free to send so just imagine if you had 500 or even 1000 or more clients with your own salon smart phone app on their phones. Sending a notification of a cancelled appointment that gets in front of that many people will almost certainly result in you filling those cancelled appointments, in fact we have proved that it does with our clients time and time again.

How you can fill empty diary Gaps using our service

The answer to this is to publish your gaps in an easy to view format in the areas that your current and potential new clients look on a regular basis, your website and your smart phone app. Our system allows this through the administration area and the inclusion of 2 lines of code on your website. Adding these lines of code to your website will produce a ‘Tab’ on the left of your webpage that when clicked will produce a fly out area showing your list of diary gaps over the next 7 days.

The key with this system is that it publishes your gaps to both existing and new clients that view your website. This provides an easy way of potentially new clients to grab a time at short notice without having to check booking systems or calling the salon, a service that your clients want and which they use. These gaps are also shown on your app and current clients over time will start to use this service too. The system keeps track of what revenue you have recovered by using the last-minute times system.